Screening Log
Displaying the past 12 log entries
Choros
BALAGAN - My personal favorite of the array of selections from the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival screening as part of this month’s Cambridge-based Balagan Film Series, Choros is a spellbinding and uplifting short. I’ll attempt to describe it: as a single dancer (the film’s co-director Terah Maher) moves across the screen, her movements multiply and overlap, and she becomes a chorus of women. It’s visually stunning stuff.
But perhaps the best tribute that I can pay to Choros is to acknowledge that there really is no describing it. It’s resistant to being reduced to words, a reminder that dance; music; and indeed, cinema; can sometimes transcend words altogether.
By Victoria Large on 19 Feb, 2012, 8:37 AM Submit Comment
The Pub
BALAGAN - Writer-director Joseph Pierce’s beautiful animated short, which utilizes rotoscoping to achieve a blend of dreaminess and realism, represents a happy marriage of form and content. The short offers a snapshot of a Camden pub and its sometimes grotesque clientele, one that is both gritty and surreal. Through the eyes of the pub’s transplanted barkeep Kemi, we see firmly-rooted pub regulars start to sprout branches and an intimidating, purported ex-gangster take the form of a gorilla. Perhaps most poignantly, the film is bookended by moments where Kemi watches her own reflection distort in the mirror. The Pub is a potent, lingering slice-of-life.
By Victoria Large on 19 Feb, 2012, 8:01 AM Submit Comment
We May Meet, We May Not
BALAGAN - With an ambient soundtrack and imagery both childlike and nightmarish, this animated short wordlessly tells the tale of a mother who cannot cope with her child growing up. The film is Lithuanian, but director Skirma Jakaite uses her distinctive drawings to tap into something powerfully universal.
By Victoria Large on 18 Feb, 2012, 6:35 PM Submit Comment
The Centrifuge Brain Project
BALAGAN - Writer-director Till Nowak’s faux documentary The Centrifuge Brain Project stars Leslie Barany as Dr. Nick Laslowicz, a scientist who designs hilariously complicated and dangerous-looking amusement park rides as a means of conducting brain research. Thanks to Nowak’s firm grasp on documentary conventions and the strange ambience of amusement parks, the film is a deadpan delight, particularly for anyone who has made themselves dizzy on a complicated and dangerous-looking ride in real life.
By Victoria Large on 18 Feb, 2012, 6:18 PM Submit Comment
Wind Over Lake
BALAGAN - The best thing about writer-director Jeorge Elkin’s strange little short Wind Over Lake is its near-Lynchian sense of humor. I’m thinking of bits like a man inexplicably hanging an air freshener from a petrol station cashier’s shirt, or an older fellow selling condoms door to door (“Perhaps you would like to sample one first?”). Luckily that humor is here in abundance, and the everyday absurdity of the film, as well as its bright visual pop, make it an agreeably odd detour.
By Victoria Large on 18 Feb, 2012, 6:09 PM Submit Comment
Bobby Yeah
BALAGAN - A BAFTA-nominated and extremely disturbing stop motion short that’s very likely to alienate the Wallace and Gromit crowd (and maybe the Nightmare Before Christmas crowd too), Bobby Yeah’s sick imagination and technical accomplishment nevertheless make it tough to dismiss. Loaded with icky reproductive imagery that gives Eraserhead a run for its money, Bobby Yeah itself feels like the unholy lovechild of a Saturday morning cartoon and a feverish nightmare.
By Victoria Large on 18 Feb, 2012, 6:01 PM Submit Comment
Killing the Chickens to Scare the Monkeys
BALAGAN - This dramatic short, which played at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, gives us a reverse-engineered timeline that begins with the execution of a group of political prisoners before revealing more of one female prisoner’s story. The result is perhaps not shocking, since even in the early scenes we’re skeptical of the reductive explanation that these people are “criminals” and “villains” who “deserve to die,” but the film is nonetheless genuinely unsettling and pointed.
By Victoria Large on 18 Feb, 2012, 5:51 PM Submit Comment
Il Capo
BALAGAN - A surprisingly poetic documentary short shot in an Italian marble quarry, Il Capo finds the strangeness in the spinning wheels and giraffe-like necks of heavy machinery, and the grace in the weathered face and nonverbal gestures of the man directing the machines. The film ends with sweeping shots of the mountains that the surround the noisy quarry site, perhaps a testament to the power of the work being done there, perhaps as an expression of awe at all that we cannot move.
By Victoria Large on 18 Feb, 2012, 5:43 PM Submit Comment
Heavy Heads
BALAGAN - Screening at Cambridge’s Brattle Theatre later this month as part of a program of highlights from the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, Helena Frank’s animated short Heavy Heads plays out in a nearly monochrome world of TV dinners, buzzing flies, and hangdog humans. There’s a startling, unsavory twist to it all that ultimately speaks to the depths of its central character’s alienation and frustration - the paucity of pleasure in an oppressively gray world.
By Victoria Large on 18 Feb, 2012, 5:33 PM Submit Comment
Fatal Deviation
Days after screening this enthralling low-budget action flick from Ireland, I’m still undecided as to which bit was my favorite: Jimmy Bennett firing a gun with each hand whilst somehow standing atop a speeding motorcycle? The annual fight-to-the-death martial arts tournament presided over by a group of monks? The local mob boss shouting, “You killed my son! Now, I am going to kill you! Just like I killed your father!”? Magical moments all. Singling out any one of them feels like I’m doing the film a disservice. For in truth, every frame of Fatal Deviation has some level of entertainment value.
To get a sense of what an evening with actor/writer/producer/cinematographer/stunt man James P. Bennet is all about, try imagining a world in which Tommy Wiseau had directed The Karate Kid. Now, picture Daniel Larusso as a burly Irish lad fresh from a correctional institution and Mr. Miyagi as a deranged monk. Toss in a gigantic hit man named Seagul in place of Johnny and a rotund mob boss instead of the Cobra Kai sensei, and the incomparable experience of watching Fatal Deviation should begin to take shape in your mind.
Then again, such comparisons might be unfair to Fatal Deviation. For Miyagi’s wax on, wax off technique is nothing compared with the branches of fire that Jimmy must endure. And Daniel-san never wanted a drink as badly as Jimmy. Barred from the local pub by two mob-friendly bouncers, Jimmy feigns defeat and pretends to walk away. Suddenly, he turns on his heels, sprints toward the door, leaps into the air, and delivers a knockdown kick to each bouncer. Wow. I guess I do have a favorite scene. I wish I had a trophy to give away. You’re all right, Bennett!
By Thomas Scalzo on 14 Feb, 2012, 6:08 PM Submit Comment
Contagion
The fact that Contagion counts the entire global populace among its characters means we don’t have much time to care about most of them, but the final scene and coda are so cooly effective that I find myself not caring.
By Michael Nordine on 04 Dec, 2011, 10:52 PM Submit Comment
Shame
Shame makes for a clear contrast to American Psycho, countering that film’s histrionic violence with histrionic sex. Both films, however, are about emotionally vacant men and their disconnection from the people around them, and the chief conceptual difference between them is that Shame’s central character is confronted by a family member who forces him to introspect his compulsive, destructive interest in pornography. In neither film do I fully sympathize with the central misanthrope; rather, as characters I find their behavior, however off-putting, transfixing for their alienness. It’s like going to the zoo only to find the animals more disquieting and perverse than expected.
Continue: This thread contains 1 additional log entryBy Rumsey Taylor on 04 Dec, 2011, 1:36 PM Submit Comment